ARTSBEAT; Cormac McCarthy, Quantum Copy Editor

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Published: February 21, 2012

Cormac McCarthy has won some of the most coveted honors in literature, from the Pulitzer Prize to a spot on Oprah's Book Club. But now it may be time for Mr. McCarthy to add another laurel to his resume: genius copy editor.

The paperback of Lawrence M. Krauss's ''Quantum Man,'' a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman, will arrive in bookstores in March bearing not just quotes from favorable reviews but a line on the back cover noting that the book reflects changes suggested by none other than the author of ''All the Pretty Horses'' and ''The Road.''

''I was thrilled that Cormac volunteered to do this,'' Mr. Krauss told the Chronicle of Higher Education. ''He said he had never done this before, but he loved the book so much that he wanted to make it better.''

The novelist's corrections appear to be more literary than scientific. In addition to suggested some rephrasing, Mr. Krauss, said, Mr. McCarthy ''made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.'' (A quick digital search through Mr. McCarthy's ''Border Trilogy'' and several other novels finds no examples of the offending punctuation.)

Mr. Krauss may be the first to brag about it on the back cover of his paperback, but he's not in fact the first top-flight physicist to get a thorough red-penciling from the publicity-shy novelist.

In 2005, Mr. McCarthy, through a friend, offered to read the manuscript of the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall's first book, ''Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.''

''He gave it a good copy-edit,'' Ms. Randall told the Radcliffe Quarterly in 2007. ''He really smoothed the prose.''

He also fiddled with the punctuation. ''Cormac isolated all the semicolons in the margin; I then removed them,'' Ms. Randall said in an email. ''Apparently exclamation points are only for exclamations! Those were removed too.''

Ms. Randall's copyeditors were a bit less conscientious, rendering his first name ''Cormack'' in the acknowledgments. But that didn't stop Mr. McCarthy from offering to help out again on Ms. Randall's second book, ''Knocking on Heaven's Door.''

''He removed the semicolons the editor added,'' Ms. Randall said. ''On a more serious note, we had some nice conversations about the material. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics example I had given in response to a question about truth and beauty.''

Mr. McCarthy has long maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others, where the clacking of his manual typewriter is sometimes audible in the hallways and his scientific knowledge commands respect. ''Cormac is scary,'' the physicist Luis Bettencourt recently told The Daily Beast. ''He just asks really good questions.''

If Mr. McCarthy reads his scientific colleagues' books carefully, some of them also return the favor. To coincide with his Oprah's Book Club appearance in 2007, several biologists and ecologists wrote essays on scientific themes in ''The Road,'' including ''Man vs. Nature: Coevolution of Social and Ecological Networks'' and ''The End of the World: Extinction and Reemergence of Life.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.